JOHN G. SUTTON
Welcome to Britain 2004, where the slippery slope into minimum-wage slavery or revolution is becoming steeper by the day. Would you aspire to be a lifelong waiter in a Burger-Bar? Or an unemployed, 50 year old, New Deal Trainee who is unwanted by the big business boys who seek only to exploit? You do not have to be a psychic to see that something is seriously wrong when British banks and institutions such as The Norwich Union insurance company ‘outsource’ employment from the UK to India, Pakistan etc. I was personally appalled when I read that over 50,000 jobs had already been lost to the UK as major employers such as HSBC, ABBEY etc. were closing down British based call centres and re-locating them overseas. The reason, they say, is economics (greed) i.e. in the UK the average wage for a call centre employee is £13,000.00 whilst in India or Pakistan the rate is £3,000.00 Exploitation rules it seems and this is being done by British institutions who obviously have no conscience re the tens if not hundreds of thousands of British people that will no longer be employed in the UK. In plain English, the workers are expendable and corporate money grabbing greed is all that matters.
There is nothing new in this ‘outsource’ idea, it happened in the 1950s and 60s to the cotton trade in Lancashire. In the little village of Foulridge, near Colne, where I was born, there were three cotton mills weaving cloth for the clothing industry. The village was busy then, in the early 1950’s. There were weavers wearing clogs and tenters, doffers, overlookers all working shifts in the sheds and creating wealth for this country. The work was not easy, it was noisy and damp in the weaving mills, but there was dignity in this hard labour. The employees, my mother and grandparents included, earned their living and were proud of their skills. Then the mill owners got the idea that the wages for weavers in Lancashire were too high compared with what they could get away with paying in India and Pakistan so they dismantled the looms, loaded them onto lorries, drove them to Liverpool docks and shipped them overseas. The people that had worked in the mills of Foulridge and hundreds of other such small villages and towns were no longer needed. Within fifteen years the cotton trade in Lancashire had virtually vanished and cloth for the clothing industry was being imported. Today they don’t even bother to import the cloth, around 90% of the clothing we buy in the High Street has been made overseas.
Then came the absolutely disgraceful confrontation between The Miners and the Edward Heath and Thatcher governments in the mid to late 1970’s. early 80’s. At the time the miners union was the most powerful in the UK and they had massive support from affiliated unions that agreed with their arguments for fair pay and conditions. Prime Minister, Colonel, Sir Edward Heath set about the miners, imposing a three-day working week that, on reflection, seems to me to have amounted to an act of intimidation against the working people of Britain. Prime Minister, now Baroness, Margaret Thatcher finished the job outlawing secondary picketing and turning the police into a political force, not too far removed from Churchill’s early days when he sent the troops in to order the miners down the pits or be shot. The Thatcher government won in the end and now there are virtually no working mines and the coal we use is imported from overseas, places like Russia where the pay is low and conditions are so bad that people are being killed and injured in unsafe pits. The hundreds of thousands of people that worked in the mines of Britain have been retrained and many now work in call centres. And we now know what is about to happen to them! All this is in the name of corporate greed for big business.
Image From The Miner's Strike
What are we all doing about this? Nothing! We are all doing nothing to halt the abuse and exploitation of the ordinary people who want little more than to work for a living wage. The government now tell us that they cannot stand in the way of progress and halt the ‘outsourcing’ of jobs, as this is the way of the world. Well, at the risk of being thought a militant, if They can’t do something perhaps they should stand aside and let someone that can act, instead of standing by and watching as we outsource everything but Burger-Joints and Pizza Places. They acted soon enough when George W. Bush whistled and They sent our soldiers into Iraq on the obvious pretext of halting that sovereign states supposed creation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Now our troops are, according to this government, helping the people of Iraq to rebuild their country, after They smashed it up to grab and control the oil deposits. What I want to know is what all this has to do with you and I? There are hundreds of thousands of old age pensioners in this country that cannot afford to keep their homes warm this winter and we are spending billions, not millions but billions of our tax-payers money on Iraq! Are we nuts? The Iraqi people do not want us there, they are killing our soldiers because they shot /bombed their families and wrecked their cities. I mean come on now, do you really blame them for fighting back? OK Sadam Hussain was a mad man, but did the Iraqi army invade us when we had Thatcher in control and she turned our own police force into union thumpers?
Mrs. Thatcher And Her Arms-Dealer Husband
And what, you may ask, has all this to do with psychic matters? Well here is a prediction: I believe that we are starting to slip into a period of serious social decline that will, unless we call a halt, lead on to massive civil unrest. Already we have seen riots in the streets of England. Burnley and Oldham experienced virtual open warfare between the British Asian community and working class white areas, which sit side by side in the old post-industrial towns of the North. There is little real work in those towns any more. As I said the staple industries are gone, exported or outsourced overseas. The people that remain scrape a living flogging Big Macs and Fries on the minimum wage or some such mind numbing tasks. Then there is the intolerable problem of drug abuse, which is completely and utterly out of control. It is a fact reported by the Home Office that 80% of all new admissions to HM Prisons are testing positive for Class ‘A’ drugs. Jails like HMP Liverpool and HMP Manchester have drug trafficking problems so what chance is there that the streets can be made drug free? There is in fact no chance and no realistic way, other than by licensed provision, that they can they control the drugs that are fuelling the violence within our society. All this is eroding our spiritual life force. We are being collectively reduced to automatons by a misguided Big Brother style government. It has to stop, it will stop but not, I believe, before we see some serious acts of insurgence.
Employment Opportunities In Post Industrial Britain